[Guardian] 7.2.5 Legion Guardian Guide by Pumps

[Deleted]

I would really like to see a log of that ursoc fight, Seditian is talking about.

I found the damage intake with two blue tank trinkets on HC was ok. Here is a log from our Heroic Kill on Thursday, I died once because my cotank screemed at me to take the boss when it was too early. Once you get the swap right, the fight is doable, but if you fuck it up, I feel it's pretty much a battle rezz in current gear.

[Rioo]

Lunar Beam is very lackluster. Especially at +7 and up where basically 1 attack from a boss will do twice the damage of your silly beam. Go R&T once you get to the harder content, scratch that, go with R&T period.

With proper interrupts you don't need Balance Affinity, it's completely useless. In case of the Mana Wyrms you would have a slight DPS increase I suppose, because you can hit them all and interrupting them won't clump them up. They don't require threat by the way, they shoot under the feet of random targets, not at a target.

Blood Frenzy I can somewhat agree with, but I like the Brambles more, as you can definitely use the extra threat. In mythic+ you need the extra threat as well, and shaving off several thousand damage from every attack is pretty decent, especially on pulls like the blood oozes in Darkheart Thicket, or the Fel Bats in Blackrook Hold. Everything you absorb through Brambles is extra threat, something you really need badly sometimes. Especially with the Skittish affix (Skittish is the +7 affix in EU this week).

As for Ursoc: How many stacks of Ironfur are you holding up? I haven't dropped below 80% on Ursoc, ever. Even when we screwed up and I had 3 stacks of Overwhelming and 2 stacks of Rend Flesh, I didn't go below 80% without the use of external cooldowns.

Isn't Blood Frenzy better since you get more IF, which scales with damage taken. Like you said a boss can hit you for a lot in mythic +7, Brambles will do nothing there except for small dots or if there's a million adds.

[Seditian]

Jesus like Im not sure thats possible haha What kind of gear are you running
As for ironfur I generally have one to two for it, seems impossible to pool up for it with him pounding on me
what in the world are you doing

I feel like I should've specified: that was on normal Ursoc. It was pretty early on in the fight so I had enough rage pooled to get 3 Ironfurs up for a bit, together with an Armor potion, bringing me to a whopping 85% physical damage. Now of course you can't keep that up forever (hell, it was only a 5 sec window), but hopefully getting 3 + 2 stacks at the same time isn't forever either.

I was still running the VH trinket at that point as well, which is another thing that brings me almost to the armor cap (~84% in this case), I replaced it with the Ichor trinket from the tree boss now, though.

Heavy Hide neck enchant was present as well, which brings me to about 30k armor (I believe that's ~77%? could be wrong) for quite a while too, with only 2 Ironfurs up.

Isn't Blood Frenzy better since you get more IF, which scales with damage taken. Like you said a boss can hit you for a lot in mythic +7, Brambles will do nothing there except for small dots or if there's a million adds.

You're right, both on EU it's currently Skittish, which basically brings us back to the Vanilla/TBC ping pong game with threat. So in that case I preferred the Brambles to squeeze out that little bit of extra threat where possible.

Oh and to close it off, here's a PSA: the double bear pulls in Darkheart Thicket can be pulled separately, it might cost you a little bit of DPS, but if you pull the second bear at 50%, the first one will die before those small monsters start overwhelming you (on higher M+ levels).

Edit: As for logs, they didn't work for some reason. We had huge problems with RC Loot Council as well. (Click)

Edit2: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ditia/advanced Apart from your Uber legendary boots, I think I outgear you (Aselata). And I don't mean that in a shitty way, but in a 5% extra versatility goes a long way-way.

Edit3: Looking at the logs, it's definitely just a normal vs heroic thing really, anything can basically be ignored about my post if you've (only) done it on heroic instead. :P

[Deleted]

Guys how do you think a guardian druid versatility / mastery are going to look like in 905+ raid gear?

Using askmrrobot it seems that with 895 gear its easily achievable to have 18-19% mastery and 12-13% versatility. I think we will easily see 23%-25% mastery along with 15%-20% versa end game raiding. Having this in mind i have to agree that the mastery nerf should not be reverse cuz we might end up overpowered. We already have highest health among all tanks (only Dks with bone shield come close) and the gap is going to grow extensively end game.


Druids are by far the tanks with most effective health. Take a look at this:

- 10% dmg reduction from thick hide
- at least 20% more health than warriors and DKs and much more than pallies/DHs/Monks (cuz of mastery)
- highest armor even without iron fur (at least 15% more)
- adaptive fur (10% less dmg taken which easiy has 100% uptime in an intensive magic dmg fight)
- With Ekowraith legendary the reduction goes from 10% to 15% in thick hide.

This is sick! That's how i always wanted bears to be. Super sturdy and tough. Finally we got it in this expansion!


Even our active mitigation is designed around 100% uptime. (pulverize 8% dmg reduction + iron fur etc).

After the Ignore pain warrior nerf (which was officialy announced yesterday) we end up being the strongest tanks in raids and quite viable in mythic +.

DHs/ DKs will still be a bit better for dungeons cuz of enormous self sustain.

But when it comes to pure damage taken no one beats us.

[Bearygood]

I feel like I should've specified: that was on normal Ursoc. It was pretty early on in the fight so I had enough rage pooled to get 3 Ironfurs up for a bit, together with an Armor potion, bringing me to a whopping 85% physical damage. Now of course you can't keep that up forever (hell, it was only a 5 sec window), but hopefully getting 3 + 2 stacks at the same time isn't forever either.

I was still running the VH trinket at that point as well, which is another thing that brings me almost to the armor cap (~84% in this case), I replaced it with the Ichor trinket from the tree boss now, though.

Heavy Hide neck enchant was present as well, which brings me to about 30k armor (I believe that's ~77%? could be wrong) for quite a while too, with only 2 Ironfurs up.



You're right, both on EU it's currently Skittish, which basically brings us back to the Vanilla/TBC ping pong game with threat. So in that case I preferred the Brambles to squeeze out that little bit of extra threat where possible.

Oh and to close it off, here's a PSA: the double bear pulls in Darkheart Thicket can be pulled separately, it might cost you a little bit of DPS, but if you pull the second bear at 50%, the first one will die before those small monsters start overwhelming you (on higher M+ levels).

Edit: As for logs, they didn't work for some reason. We had huge problems with RC Loot Council as well. (Click)

Edit2: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ditia/advanced Apart from your Uber legendary boots, I think I outgear you (Aselata). And I don't mean that in a shitty way, but in a 5% extra versatility goes a long way-way.

Edit3: Looking at the logs, it's definitely just a normal vs heroic thing really, anything can basically be ignored about my post if you've (only) done it on heroic instead. :P

You both and your shiny gear

848 here RIP

[Seditian]

You both and your shiny gear

848 here RIP

To be fair, I ran like 30 mythic+ dungeons already

[Deleted]

The reason I wanted a log is, that I don't see how you can stack Rend Flesh's. They only have 12 seconds of uptime and are cast on a 30 sec CD.

Outgearing me doesn't seem to hard, since all of our tank gear goes to our DH, because he is a DH.

OT: @Bearygood. If you can provide an armory link and/or a log, we can probably give you more specific tips, but without knowing much about your situation, I can only give the most basic of advise, and that is to concentrate on the swap. Meaning: While you have Rend Flesh, you shouldn't have the boss, so it shouldn't hurt to much. You should never have both debuffs at once, and you should never have more than 2 stacks of Overwhelm. If you look at the 2 debuffs in my log, you can see that that works out actually quite fine. The wowhead guide describes it as well.

I don't think pooling rage is really an answer, I just played with Bristling Fur, and used that whenever I had him and it was up, so that I could stack the IF's as high as possible. Other than that I can only recommend to use your CD's liberally and to use the externals your raid has. Like I said, pretty generic advice.

[Seditian]

The reason I wanted a log is, that I don't see how you can stack Rend Flesh's. They only have 12 seconds of uptime and are cast on a 30 sec CD.

Outgearing me doesn't seem to hard, since all of our tank gear goes to our DH, because he is a DH.

OT: @Bearygood. If you can provide an armory link and/or a log, we can probably give you more specific tips, but without knowing much about your situation, I can only give the most basic of advise, and that is to concentrate on the swap. Meaning: While you have Rend Flesh, you shouldn't have the boss, so it shouldn't hurt to much. You should never have both debuffs at once, and you should never have more than 2 stacks of Overwhelm. If you look at the 2 debuffs in my log, you can see that that works out actually quite fine. The wowhead guide describes it as well.

I don't think pooling rage is really an answer, I just played with Bristling Fur, and used that whenever I had him and it was up, so that I could stack the IF's as high as possible. Other than that I can only recommend to use your CD's liberally and to use the externals your raid has. Like I said, pretty generic advice.

Ah, I might've confused it in that case.

As for the pooling rage, if you're not dropping below 80% I don't really see the point of adding another Ironfur, not on normal at least. But I'll be doing heroic soon enough so maybe the damage incoming might finally be high enough to have to worry about anything as a tank.

[davidrm15]

Aynone can share a Weak auras profile ( i use droodfocus last xpa, but now need to move to weak auras)?

[Bearygood]

To be fair, I ran like 30 mythic+ dungeons already

How do you deal with skittish? I went into a mythic +7 today and had severe trouble with holding threat with brambles included.

[Deleted]

How do you deal with skittish? I went into a mythic +7 today and had severe trouble with holding threat with brambles included.

did a cos + 9 on my bear yesterday.. as u only pull hard groups when your dd´s have cd´s rdy, on most pulls your rage of the sleeper is rdy too. what helps a lot with threat. and (of course) u should have a hunter in your group. bm hunter with md is our best friend during skittish weeks <3

[Bearygood]

did a cos + 9 on my bear yesterday.. as u only pull hard groups when your dd´s have cd´s rdy, on most pulls your rage of the sleeper is rdy too. what helps a lot with threat. and (of course) u should have a hunter in your group. bm hunter with md is our best friend during skittish weeks <3

Yea we have a hunter misdirecting constantly. Our enhancement shaman goes and destroys threat in a matter of seconds.

Wondering what to do

[Bunnychaser]

Anywho, in regards to beam vs R&T.
Here's a log of us two chesting a 9 (We stopped dps on the final boss to get one chest to get a 10 key not an 11 key; but we were three minutes ahead on the final boss.)

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...=13&source=203

Beam was 7.11% of my damage and 7.53% of my healing.

Math wise, beam healed me for 3.6% of my total damage taken.

It'll be very hard for anyone to convince me beam is worse than R&T (In M+) with actual math, not opinion. (At least, before the thrash stack legendary.)

[Seditian]

How do you deal with skittish? I went into a mythic +7 today and had severe trouble with holding threat with brambles included.

I've only done a single +7 so far, we're going to push for highest possible tomorrow. We failed the +7 by 2 minutes, we wiped because someone pulled on a thing we were supposed to skip. I'm in EU though, which has Teeming + Skittish instead of Bolstering + Skittish. Not really sure what's harder, but I feel like it's Teeming, only because it's even harder to keep aggro as there's ~50% more trash. Whereas Bolstering only really requires high AoE and some single target focus on highest health mobs in packs. Skittish only really requires you using DPS cooldowns, which is why Brambles is so awesome, Barkskin makes you take a ton less damage while also pulsing 10k every second on every mob nearby. Not a guarantee to keep aggro by a long shot, but it definitely helps!

I'm also a Tauren, I can't even begin to count how many times War Stomp (and having ~150k extra health) has saved my or a party member's ass.

Anywho, in regards to beam vs R&T.
Here's a log of us two chesting a 9 (We stopped dps on the final boss to get one chest to get a 10 key not an 11 key; but we were three minutes ahead on the final boss.)

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...=13&source=203

Beam was 7.11% of my damage and 7.53% of my healing.

Math wise, beam healed me for 3.6% of my total damage taken.

It'll be very hard for anyone to convince me beam is worse than R&T (In M+) with actual math, not opinion. (At least, before the thrash stack legendary.)

Only healing 3.6% of your total damage taken means R&T is nearly twice as good to mitigate damage, right? And it doing 7.11% of your damage, means that the 92.89% of the damage would be increased by 6% by R&T, so it's not that far behind damage-wise.

Theincbear has some math about Lunar Beam vs R&T, I'll quote it below:

We know that Lunar Beam heals for 24*AP total, however that value is also multiplied by Versatility, Crit, and our Mastery bonus. Using the sample data, we can easily generate a total heal of ~691,465. Unfortunately that only happens every 90 seconds. Healing for ~30% of your HP is no small thing, however consider Rend and Tear over the same period. For R&T to equal that, you only have to take (100(691,465))/6 or 11,524,420 over 90 seconds which is ~128,049 DTPS. That’s a pretty trivial number to reach in any kind of content. In all honesty I’d probably cut the cooldown of Lunar Beam in half for it to be a midpoint between R&T and what Pulverize will end up sitting at.

To clarify: in a full Maw of Souls +4 run, looking at "total data" I took 183k damage per second. And healed 98.4k per second of that, with R&T, Brambles and Restoration Specialization.

[Bunnychaser]

You doing math assuming the fact that R&T is at 3 stacks is the exact reason why you are wrong.

On average, my trash pulls in that instance were 50 seconds. That means that 1/3 of the trash was ramping R&T, and especially with skiddish, where we're bursting as soon as we can to ensure threat, that means that for ALL of your EOTN (A majority of your damage), you have 1 stack of thrash.

The damage is probably 3% worse overall in a dungeon.

The mitigation may be slightly better or equal. At best, it's 1% better.

The entire argument in it being worse specifically in mythic dungeons is that you burst on the pull on mobs with 0 or 1 R&T stacks, and most mobs are below half before you hit 3.

A majority of your damage is not affected by 3 stacks of R&T.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

I have a question about stat priority. It takes 800 versatility to reach 1% damage reduction and it takes 700 mastery to reach 1% max health. Why do people say versatility is better than mastery when 1% damage reduction and 1 % health is absolutely the same and it takes 700 mastery to reach 1% while 800 versa to do the same?

Because it also gives you hps and damage?

- - - Updated - - -

You doing math assuming the fact that R&T is at 3 stacks is the exact reason why you are wrong.

On average, my trash pulls in that instance were 50 seconds. That means that 1/3 of the trash was ramping R&T, and especially with skiddish, where we're bursting as soon as we can to ensure threat, that means that for ALL of your EOTN (A majority of your damage), you have 1 stack of thrash.

The damage is probably 3% worse overall in a dungeon.

The mitigation may be slightly better or equal. At best, it's 1% better.

The entire argument in it being worse specifically in mythic dungeons is that you burst on the pull on mobs with 0 or 1 R&T stacks, and most mobs are below half before you hit 3.

A majority of your damage is not affected by 3 stacks of R&T.

This Guy gets it.

[Seditian]

You doing math assuming the fact that R&T is at 3 stacks is the exact reason why you are wrong.

On average, my trash pulls in that instance were 50 seconds. That means that 1/3 of the trash was ramping R&T, and especially with skiddish, where we're bursting as soon as we can to ensure threat, that means that for ALL of your EOTN (A majority of your damage), you have 1 stack of thrash.

The damage is probably 3% worse overall in a dungeon.

The mitigation may be slightly better or equal. At best, it's 1% better.

The entire argument in it being worse specifically in mythic dungeons is that you burst on the pull on mobs with 0 or 1 R&T stacks, and most mobs are below half before you hit 3.

A majority of your damage is not affected by 3 stacks of R&T.

You're doing the math wrong as well. The third stack of Trash is up on the 11th second in the fight already. Keep in mind you open up with Trash, your Thrash doesn't magically go on cooldown on every pull. That means, in your example, that the third stack is up for 80% of the fight, whereas your Lunar Beam is up only every 2 pulls. Besides, you're completely ignoring the fact that Lunar Beam also takes up a global cooldown. You could've used another swipe there, which is 25% of the TOTAL damage of Lunar Beam.

And how exactly is EOTN the majority of your damage? It's only a 25% damage increase... you're really grasping here. I'll give you the burst threat part, but that's about it for Lunar Beam, really.

That and as an ex-healer, I'll take consistency over burst any day of the week when it comes to keeping tanks up.

[Ultramad]

What I see from this discussion is that both talents are very close in both defensive and offensive play and such we should use whichever we personally prefer as tanks.

Love it, thanks you two.

[Dreyen]

lunar beam is good for mythics because theres downtime between pulls, which increases its uptime. R&T isnt as good becuase you need to stack it up.

For raiding it's most likely the other way around, esp if you get 5x stack legendary.

[Iry]

You're doing the math wrong as well. The third stack of Trash is up on the 11th second in the fight already. Keep in mind you open up with Trash, your Thrash doesn't magically go on cooldown on every pull. That means, in your example, that the third stack is up for 80% of the fight, whereas your Lunar Beam is up only every 2 pulls. Besides, you're completely ignoring the fact that Lunar Beam also takes up a global cooldown. You could've used another swipe there, which is 25% of the TOTAL damage of Lunar Beam.

At the beginning of the trash pull you don't have any Ironfur or Ursol. That's when you need burst healing the most. Lunar Beam is excellent for accumulating aggro and staying stable during those crucial first handful of seconds. Sure, R&T pulls ahead of Lunar Beam at the 12th second, but at the 12th second you're stable and in considerably less danger.

It also has merit since you can pop it and give your healer some breathing room to heal up the squishies during a boss.
So it is less effective strategically, but more effective tactically.